Richard Dutton is editing Jonson's comedy Volpone for the
forthcoming modernized six-volume Cambridge Ben Jonson. In Ben Jonson,
Volpone, and the Gunpowder Plot, a by-product of his editing labors,
Dutton advances several claims. In keeping with the preference among
many Jonson scholars for Jonson's edgier quarto editions over the
later versions of the plays published in the monumental first folio of
1616, Dutton favors the 1607 quarto edition of Volpone. He focuses
attention on its prefatory poems by John Donne, George Chapman, and
Edmund Bolton, among others, and its Epistle addressed to the
play's dedicatees, the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Jonson
scholars have long recognized the aesthetic significance of his Epistle,
in which Jonson articulates his humanist credo and defends by means of
classical precedents the harsh judgments meted out to the protagonists
of his satiric comedy. Dutton, by contrast, reads the Epistle and
several of the prefatory poems as coded political responses to the
crisis of the Gunpowder Plot. In Volpone, Dutton argues, Jonson uses a
beast fable set in Venice to address "the parlous state of
England--rather than Venice--at the time it was written, in the wake of
the Gunpowder Plot, albeit hiding behind the [plausible] deniability
which beast fable, of all forms, traditionally affords" (73).
Dutton also reads Volpone's biting satire of patronage relations,
and its subplot starring the inane English diplomat Sir Politic
Would-be, as vehicles for Jonson's political and religious
estrangement from the government over its repression of religious
minorities.

One of the key assumptions Dutton makes in his study relates to
Jonson's Catholicism. Dutton views Jonson's conversion to
"Roman Catholicism as an act of symbolic resistance to the
overweening state" (25-26) that had branded and imprisoned him in
the years immediately prior to the Gunpowder Plot. In 1605, Jonson was a
recusant, with peripheral social ties to some of the plotters. Dutton is
right to insist that Jonson responded intensely to the discovery of the
Plot; his "protestations of loyalty" in his letter to Robert
Cecil, earl of Salisbury, are, however, discounted by Dutton, who
construes them as "prudential gestures" (23). Dutton ignores
Jonson's epigrams to Lord Mounteagle and King James, poems that
elaborate the government's story of the miraculous discovery of the
Plot and act as further confirmation of Jonson's claims in his
letter to Cecil. There are good reasons to take Jonson at his word here.
The first is the unabashed fervor with which he expresses his loyalty to
"his Maiesty, and my Country" and "all Christianity"
(1) in his November 7 letter. The second relates to the king's
speech to Parliament just two days later, on November 9, where James
distinguished the plotters' monstrous treason from the loyalty
shown by the majority of English Catholics, who remained in his words
"good and faithful Subiects." (2) James's speech
cautioned his listeners explicitly and at length against the urge to
demonize all Catholics: "I would be sorie that any being innocent
of this practise [treason], either domesticall or forraine, should
receiue blame or harme for the same. For although it cannot be denied.
That it was the onely blinde superstition of their errors in Religion,
that led them [the plotters] to this desperate deuice; yet doth it not
follow, That all professing that Romish religion were guiltie of the
same." (3) In light of the hysteria generated by the Plot's
discovery, James's speech distinguishing between the plotters and
those Catholics who were loyal to his rule and government was an
important intervention in the unfolding crisis. James and his ministers
were resolved to prosecute the surviving plotters rigorously, but the
king's determination not to persecute "innocent"
Catholics suggests a temperate and measured response. Dutton fails to
register these more nuanced responses to the Gunpowder Plot, either on
the part of the government or among English Catholics. He assumes,
without ever proving his case, that Jonson was disingenuous in
professing his loyalty to king and country during the Gunpowder crisis
and that his conversion to Roman Catholicism was prompted solely by
Jonson's defiance of an overbearing government.

The title of Dutton's book is misleading, since he relegates
discussion of the Gunpowder Plot itself to a few inconclusive pages in
the first chapter. Dutton admits that "I have nothing new to say on
these questions, much less anything definitive. Beyond a certain point I
am more concerned with what people thought at the time had happened, and
the consequences to individuals like Jonson of what was deemed to have
happened, than I am in the events themselves" (18-19). This is a
curious stance given that Dutton's announced purpose in focusing
attention on Jonson's Volpone in relation to the Gunpowder Plot is
"to put the play back into that history" (1). Dutton seems not
to have consulted Mark Nicholls' Investigating Gunpowder Plot
(1991). (4) Nicholls' balanced history of the Stuart
government's investigation and prosecution of the plotters is based
on extensive archival research. Investigating Gunpowder Plot effectively
demolishes many of the conspiracy theories that have clung to this
notorious instance of early modern terrorism. Among the rumors Nicholls
dispels is the speculation that Robert Cecil, James I's
controversial minister, stage-managed the Plot as a devious and
self-promoting means of advancing his own repressive anti-Catholic
policies. Historians have concluded that Cecil's political
ambitions, while real, did not reach to his inventing or fomenting the
Plot itself, nor was he a religious fanatic bent on persecuting
Catholics. In vilifying Robert Cecil and even insinuating that he may
have had a hand in the Plot itself, Dutton flies in the face of recent
scholarship on the Gunpowder Plot. The credibility of his argument is
considerably undermined by his preference for recycling conspiracy
theories over attending more scrupulously to new historical research.
When Dutton defends his anti-Cecil reading by saying, "I should
stress, of course, that the issue here is not whether any of this is
true or not, but how things were perceived, in some quarters at least,
at the time" (42), it does not inspire confidence, at least not in
this quarter.

When we engage in interdisciplinary projects of this kind, we need
to be responsible to the disciplines we draw on and from. In undertaking
this book. Dutton should have attended more to the facticity of history
and the complex mesh of religion and politics in early modern England.
His failure to do so ultimately vitiates a project that had real promise
and interest, not only to Jonson scholars but to the larger community of
readers that Dutton evidently wanted to reach with this book.

(2.) King James, "A SPEECH IN THE PARLIAMENT HOVSE," in
King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 152.

(3.) Ibid.

(4.) Mark Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1991). Nicholls' book was recommended
reading for all of us who participated in the workshop held at the
Folger Institute on November 4-5, 2005, on the topic, "Early Modern
Terrorism? The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and its Aftermath."

Reviewer: JENNIFER BRADY

COPYRIGHT 2011 Associated University Presses
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.